Thursday, February 23, 2012

Backstage in Another Century

My friend Marty recently shared this twelve minute clip from The World’s Greatest Rock ’n Roll Party, a closed-circuit and pay-per-view-special broadcast live in the United States on December 18, 1981. Allegedly the first pay-per-view music event, the program featured the Rolling Stones' full show in Hampton, Virginia as well as the above footage taken backstage prior to the performance. The show was trumpeted in the New York Times in an October 31 article, "Rolling Stones Plan A Special":

The Rolling Stones have announced plans to close their
United States tour with a closed-circuit television special, to be broadcast
via satellite from a New York nightclub on Dec. 18. The name of the club has
not been disclosed.

The special, to be called ''The World's Greatest Rock 'n'
Roll Party,'' will include guest stars from rock, rhythm-and-blues and
country-and-western music, and will be shown on large screens and broadcast
through concert sound systems in 200 theaters and halls around the country. The
sites will be decorated with balloons and other party paraphernalia.

Everything about the Stones' 1981 tour was big, from the size of the stages to the largess of the commercial sponsorships to the hundreds of balloons released each night during "Satisfaction" to the distant satellite beaming the songs back to a grateful earth. The footage above is uncanny. A week and a half earlier I'd seen the Stones at Capital Center in Largo, Maryland. For weeks we'd heard rumors on the radio and among those in the know that the Stones had themed backstages during this tour: one city recreated a circus; another a desert oasis. I remember hearing about a pay-per-view special at the time, but those
were for the rich kids, the ones whose parents splurged on those kinds of
things, looking the other way; kids who got to watch pay-per-view events felt older to me even
if they were my age. So whatever imagery I possessed of those backstages was wholly, and luridly, imagined. I wondered, I wondered, I guessed, I fantasized....

Three decades later it's amusing to see Keith and Ronny goof around with George Thorogood, who opened the show, and various kids (Keith's) and women (Ronny's, I think). Mick drinks from a large bottle of Gatorade and and stretches and looks like he's wearing his daddy's purple suit. Charlie, on form, lurks in the background politely. Wyman slithers about in a polyester jacket, mentally tabulating last night's hotel room conquests. It's all very...tame, certainly lacking the wealthy decadence and "party paraphernalia" that I'd imagined, and yet similar to a laidback, rarefied, entitled vibe that I'd guessed at. Directors Tom Trbovich and Hal Ashby (the latter helmed the feature-length tour film Let's Spend The Night Together) attempt, somewhat lamely, to create a "special access" mood—note the corny first-person POV shot at the opening—and to call back to Stones Road Myths in the form of, gasp! women in the men's room! farm animals! grotto-like steam! a snake coiling around a urinal! It looks quite staged, and a bit dated, an attempt to supply myth before it's been earned, or after it's gone stale. But once the camera turns on the band hanging out on chairs and milling around, they play it loose and casual, a tad self-conscious. Cocksucker Blues it is not.

What's interesting to me is how long it took me to see this footage, which has not been released commercially, having wound up predictably on YouTube. Today, every other person in that backstage—from family members to road crew members to hangers-on (to Bill Graham)—would have phone cameras, clicking away and documenting everything, evidence of Backstage With The Stones leaking on to Twitter and Facebook within seconds. No one will have to wait three decades anymore to see if his fantasies match up with reality. What will be the New Fantasizing in this century?

~~

Oh yeah, and this happened at the end of the night. Mythology after all:

Keith: "I saw nobody between him and Mick: Oh God, here we go, I'm not gonna get any more money for this (laughs)... I have no idea what this guy's gonna do. I don't know if he's gonna stab Mick, hug him, kiss him, roll over and screw him. I don't know! All I know is that he's trying to get his hands on Mick and this I have to prevent. And I do have a weapon in my hands (laughs).... I was playing 'Satisfaction' at the time. This is gonna sound terrible but the damn thing stayed in tune. And this is the greatest advert for Fender! (laughs)."

No comments:

No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing (forthcoming), Field Recordings from the Inside (essays), This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), Conversations With Greil Marcus, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. ✸✸ Music Columnist for The Normal School. ✸✸ Five-time "Notable Essay" selection at Best American Essays. ✸✸ Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

BOOKS

Field Recordings from the Inside

Soft Skull Press

“The collection’s 18 essays do what the best music writing is supposed to do—they make the reader care, regardless of whether they enjoy, or are familiar with, the material being written about; I was mostly willing to follow Bonomo anywhere he wanted to go.” Los Angeles Review of Books

This Must Be Where My Obsession with Infinity Began

Orphan Press

"Joe Bonomo seems to have a Cornell box for each difficult, lyrical moment he remembers. He is a theorist of the self's construction out of the past, full of resistance and the heartbreaking urge to yield." David Lazar

Conversations With Greil Marcus

University Press of Mississippi

"Marcus's knowledge of music and his widespread interests in related topics make this a delight and a real page-turner." The Big Takeover

AC/DC's Highway to Hell

Bloomsbury

"One of the five most important books about AC/DC." Jesse Fink, author of Bon: The Last Highway

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found

Bloomsbury

"I've read most of the books about him and will now put Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music." Lincoln Journal Star

Installations

Penguin

Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band

Bloomsbury

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." Nick Tosches

IN TRANSLATION

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found

Camion Blanc

The Fleshtones: Histoire d'un Groupe de Garage Américain

Camion Blanc

ANTHOLOGIES

The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from The Normal School

Outpost19

Brief Encounters: An Anthology of Short Nonfiction

Norton

Clash By Night

CityLit Press

The Birth of Rock and Roll

Dust-to-Digital

How To Write About Music

Bloomsbury

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice